Op-Ed

Soon after my arrival to Israel as a stateless person, i.e. refugee, from Iraq, in 1951, I met with Israeli ministers and politicians, even I had interview with the late Mr. Ben Gurion, the prime minister then, the minister of health, and the late Mr. Begin the leader of Herut. I also spoke with Mr. Shlomo Hillel, the person most active in the exodus of the Jews from Iraq. I tried to convince them that the Jews of Arab countries, almost one million of them, who arrived to Israel penniless, were refugees. The response was NO, they were Zionists. I challenged that assertion time and again, by asking audiences whom I addressed, if any of them would leave all their properties and assets and go to Israel because of the Zionist

With the presidential election campaign in full swing, that quadrennial question arises once more—how will the Jews vote? The majority of American Jews have been voting Democratic for some eighty years, often overwhelmingly so. Before each national election the Republicans try to break the pattern, and pundits wonder whether this time it will be different. Up to now it hasn’t.

AJC, the nonpartisan Jewish advocacy organization that has tracked Jewish voting behavior for more than three decades

Why does the Turkish government act so aggressively against the Assad regime of Syria?

Perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hopes that lobbing artillery shells into Syria will help bring a satellite government to power in Damascus. Maybe he expects that sending a Turkish war plane into Syrian air space or forcing down a Syrian civilian plane en route from Russia will win him favor in the West and bring in NATO. Conceivably, it’s all a grand diversion from imminent economic crisis due to

It was, unfortunately, no surprise when the Obama Administration selected Salam Al-Marayati to join the U.S. delegation at a human rights conference being held in Warsaw by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

No surprise, because Marayati, the director of the Islamist Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), had already been dispatched by the Obama Administration in 2010 to speak on human rights on behalf of the U.S. to UNESCO in Paris and at the U.S. mission to the